When telephone service is to be established for a new telephone number, several pre-ordering functions must be performed to setup an order to provision the service. The address at which the service is to be established must be validated, to ensure that provisioning is not attempted at an incorrect or non-existent address. A telephone number must be assigned to the service, and a long distance primary interexchange carrier (PIC) must be assigned to the telephone number. Where the new service is being established by an existing customer, such as when the customer moves from one location to another, that customer's migrated service records must be transferred to the new service. The features of the new service must be selected. The connections and facilities available at the new address must be determined in order to determine the work that is necessary to establish the service. Finally, the date of the installation of the service must be selected.
In the past, these functions had to be performed largely separately and often manually, resulting in delay and inefficiency. A need arises for a solution by which all of these functions may be performed together in an automated manner.